Reading tea party leaves on marriage

If you’re a conservative activist or major Republican donor, you have some interesting social options in front of you this month. Tea or cocktails? A small-government rally or a fundraiser for same-sex marriage? Pack yourself in with the grass roots at a mass meeting or rub shoulders with the legal elite in a posh drawing room?

But more is at stake than options on a menu of social gatherings. With the same tension that has existed in past efforts by some GOP elites to play down social issues or envelop them in a “Big Tent” — but with far more intensity than ever before — the perennial, or more properly quadrennial, identity crisis among Republicans is boiling to the surface.

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It’s already clear where the glamour resides. The cachet is to be found with those elite Republican fund-raisers and political maestros, who favor not just a tamping down of social issue activism but an embrace of avant-garde ideas like same-sex marriage.

The reaction to Ken Mehlman’s admission that he is homosexual and regrets his involvement on behalf of preserving traditional marriage is typical. The former Republican National Committee chairman and campaign manager for George W. Bush was greeted with cheers Washington, and quickly rechristened “one of the sharpest and most energetic political talents” in the land.

The same cachet is bestowed on Steve Schmidt, the California-based political consultant who guided John McCain’s 2008 campaign. Announcing that he would co-sponsor a fund-raising cocktail party for the group sponsoring the legal challenge to California’s pro-traditional marriage Prop 8, Schmidt told The Huffington Post that there “is a conservative case to be made in favor of gay marriage.”

Cachet like this is an intangible commodity that is worth its weight in gold. In Washington, however, it is usually purchased through one of two things – inherent glamour (Hollywood) or victory at the ballot box. In politics, victory is paramount.

The truly fascinating cases occur when cachet is purchased despite a trail of major defeats. In these instances cachet happens because it comports with a media meme that transcends reality.

Being a “conservative for same-sex marriage” is now the maximum meme. Which makes the political failure it obscures all the more emblematic. Political evidence past and present renders the advice of men like Mehlman and Schmidt not only suspect but downright foolhardy.

Since 1998 when liberal Hawaii became the first state to vote for language in its constitution to protect man-woman marriage, a total of 31 states have voted on the issue. More than 60 million ballots have been cast in the process, and nearly 40 million of them – more than 63 percent – have been marked in the pro-traditional marriage column.

Schmidt’s wizardry produced a 2008 presidential campaign that downplayed the differences between McCain and Barack Obama on social issues – including marriage. (McCain ran a somewhat different campaign with a dramatically different result this past month in Arizona. The result? The cause of traditional marriage prevailed in California by 600,000 votes. On the same day, on the same ballot, McCain lost California by 24 percentage points. Traditional marriage prevailed in Los Angeles County. McCain was buried there, following Schmidt’s advice. Some wizard. Some cachet.